Little was heard about president Barack Obama’s call, in his last State of the Union address, to make community college free around the country. But now, facing gnawing affordability problems and the prospect of weakened enrollment, many of California’s community colleges — and sympathetic officials — have embarked on a patchwork of programs and initiatives designed to capitalize on the prestige of the president’s vision. 

Perhaps predictably, ground zero for the new effort is the city of Oakland, where Mayor Libby Schaaf, a former aide to Gov. Jerry Brown, has pushed one of the more sweeping and aggressive moves to alter the way community colleges are paid for. Schaaf “is championing a $39 million citywide initiative called Oakland Promise that includes a free semester of community college for new graduates,” as the San Jose Mercury News reported. “While Oakland’s initiative is far more ambitious and costly than most of the other new programs inspired by Obama’s America’s College Promise, more than a dozen other colleges statewide are also advertising free tuition, extra advising and mentoring or expanded summer orientation programs for the coming academic year.”

Mission College in Santa Clara is giving $1,000 scholarships to local students — roughly equivalent to a year’s tuition — through a new program called Mission First. West Valley College in Saratoga is offering a tuition-free first semester to 600 local high school graduates. Skyline College in San Bruno touts a scholarship for recent high school graduates bearing the motto “Get in. Get through. Get out … on time!”

Municipal momentum

Policymakers in other big California cities have also put forth plans to bring down community college costs. In San Francisco, “Supervisor Jane Kim introduced a proposal to eliminate tuition for City College of San Francisco students and to help them cover the cost of books, transportation and child care,” Inside Higher Ed noted. “The Free City College Proposal would eliminate enrollment fees for all San Francisco residents and workers who work at least part time in the city. Students whose fees are already covered by financial aid would still be eligible for up to $1,000 in grants for textbooks, transportation and child care.”

The move came in the wake of Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti’s announcement, during his State of the City address, that he would raise $1.5 million for a new program paying the way of LAUSD grads for their first year of community college, “splitting its estimated initial $3 million cost with the district,” according to LAist. Because the Mayor of Los Angeles has no official control over city schools, the site added, “Garcetti’s role in the initiative appears to be purely advisory” beyond his fundraising effort, which will target philanthropic and business donors. 

Statewide legislation

In Sacramento, meanwhile, lawmakers considered the so-called California College Promise, which would allocate more financial aid toward ancillary costs of community college such as transportation and housing. Known as Assembly Bill 2681, the legislation would also “facilitate partnerships between community colleges and school districts to create more college preparatory courses for high school students” and “waive remediation classes for some students, therefore shortening their time to completion,” according to the Long Beach Post. The bill passed the state Assembly’s Committee on Higher Education last month.

The precarious financial position of the majority of in-state enrollees and students has begun to weigh heavily on administrators and policymakers, who hope to keep community colleges both solvent enough and sufficiently well attended to remain going. A recent report prepared by the Institute for College Access and Success suggested that as much as 61 percent of California community college students come from “very low income” families (defined as those earning under $30,000 a year), with over 55 percent, based on FAFSA calculations, “are not expected to contribute to college expenses,” as GoodCall observed. 

Photo credit: usnews.com

While California students mustered to lead a nationwide movement for college debt relief, policymakers and innovators grappled with the issue in ways of their own.

Students in the UC system — particularly the Berkeley campus — have taken a central role in pushing the co-called Million Student March. Protest organizers have announced a sweeping agenda including “a $15 minimum wage for student employees on college campuses, free tuition at public universities, and the abolition of student debt,” according to Time. “The Million Student March was an idea that started with a remark made by U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders, stating elected officials wouldn’t care about supporting higher education until a million students were out marching,” as UCSA President Kevin Sabo told the Daily Californian.

An uncertain path

The latest elements of student debt policy emanating from Washington have been a mixed bag. The new revisions to the federal Pay As You Earn program “will let all borrowers with federal direct student loans who are not in default cap their monthly payments at 10 percent of discretionary income, no matter when they borrowed or their debt-to-income ratio,” as the San Francisco Chronicle reported.

Meanwhile, a twist in federal robocall law has raised the specter of heightened fraud risks for targeted students. “Under the new provision, robocalls could only be directed at people with student loans backed by the federal government,” noted KOMO Channel 4 News. “For many, that’s just one more opportunity for scammers and deceptive marketers to expand their operations. State and federal regulators already have their hands full with illegal companies that make unsolicited calls claiming they can help consumers consolidate student loan debt or get loan modifications  for a large and illegal up-front free.”

Tuition politics

Californians have actually fared better than others as the debt crisis continues its upward spiral. “Students graduating from California colleges had just $21,382 in loans, fourth-lowest among the states,” the Institute for College Access and Success noted in its tenth annual report on student debt, according to the Chronicle.

“The state’s Cal Grant program pays up to the full cost of systemwide tuition and fees at University of California and California State University campuses, and up to a certain dollar amount ($9,084 in 2014-15) at qualifying private colleges. These grants, available to California residents from low- and moderate-income families, have helped defray soaring tuition.”

ICAS research director Debbie Cochrane told the Chronicle that “tuition at UC and CSU campuses rose 128 percent, but the average debt for public-college graduates rose only 43 percent” over the past 10 years.

But some Golden State politicos have sought to frame state education as a crisis in need of broad new government support. Along with UC Regent Eloy Ortiz, Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom announced his support for an initiative called California College Promise, “a bold effort to offer two tuition-free years of community college for responsible students,” as they argued in the San Jose Mercury News. “This promise is true to California’s tradition of advancing our educational system at critical junctures to present future generations with better opportunities to succeed,” they wrote.

Disrupting debt

At the same time, student debt has attracted the attention of California’s startup scene. One new highly selective startup school, Make School, offers a two-year curriculum in tech — “billed as ‘debt-free education,'” as the Mercury News reported. “Ashu Desai, the 23-year-old cofounder of Make School, said widespread concerns about student debt and abuses in the for-profit college sector influenced his decision not to charge tuition up front. Instead, the school charges a percentage of graduates’ wages — or, alternatively, an investment in their startup — instead of a flat fee.”

The change comes from the very top of California’s community college system, whose chancellor, Brice Harris, offered a list of 15 schools to the Board of Governors overseeing community colleges from Sacramento. Last year, state Sen. Marty Block, D-San Diego, introduced Senate Bill 850, which paved the way for some “postsecondary” schools to receive four-year baccalaureate accreditation under a seven-year pilot program.

As the Fresno Bee reports, the legislation “allows a maximum of 15 college districts to offer a single four-year degree each in subjects not currently offered by the University of California or California State University systems.” Harris also made recommendations for which sort of degrees to confer, the Bee noted, from emergency services and dental hygiene to automotive technology and mortuary science.

In a press release, Block portrayed SB850 more as a necessity than an innovation. “It’s wishful thinking to believe we can meet the challenge of producing another 1 million bachelor degrees by 2025 without using community colleges, and the longer we delay in using them, the further behind we will fall,” he said.

Ambitions are running high. Block went so far as to tell the San Jose Mercury News his bill would “frankly change the face of higher education in California forever.” In keeping with his sense of urgency — and the broader fear of educational non-competitiveness raised in California by the Common Core standards and the Vergara ruling against teacher tenure — the Board of Governors will deliver its final approval for the pilot program in March, following a preliminary vote.

Battle lines form

Perhaps predictably, the expansion of community college has fostered political conflict. Activists aligned with Obama fear that, unless federal and state legislators elbow forcefully into the community college market, corporate interests will advance a competing model of postsecondary education, with the same emphasis on vocational training that Block, Harris and others envision.

In These Times, a publication centered around labor activism, warned the alternative to increased public spending on community college expansion included an increase in for-profit vocational schools, more rigid educational performance metrics, and more K-12 closings.

At the same time, Obama’s plan to make community college free has mobilized a different set of critics. The popularity of initiatives like California’s four-year pilot program could hinge on the appeal of Obama’s proposal, which leaves the Golden State “a relative loser,” according to the Los Angeles Times’ Karin Klein.

“Rather than provide a particular amount per student,” explains Klein, Obama’s plan gives states three-quarters of what they charge in fees — “up to about $2,500, with states picking up the rest.” Since California has maintained relatively low tuition costs, most other states do better under the plan. “Thirty-seven states charge more than twice what California does,” Klein notes.

White House campaigning

But California is ground zero for postsecondary education policy. The state set a new record in degrees conferred last year — on the strength of students completing “remedial math and English courses,” as education officials announced. In his recent visit to Los Angeles, Vice President Joe Biden took pains to stump for Obama’s proposed initiative, which is projected to cost some $60 billion over 10 years.

There is at least one significant obstacle to synergy between California’s postsecondary plans and the White House’s.

Obama’s scheme presumes that only the first two years of community college would be paid for with tax dollars. As the Times observed, “It’s unclear if the funding would alleviate overcrowding in some courses. Many students still complain that they have a difficult time enrolling in such high-demand classes as introductory math and English.”

The Times pointed out those remedial courses must come before classes taken for credit — and about 75 percent of community college students in California have to take them.

That’s the key phrase in an excellent L.A. Times investigative story that ran today on how a $5.7 billion L.A. community college bond was spent.

Keep that in mind as Gov. Jerry Brown and others demand $12 billion in new taxes for the state. About 40% of state general-fund spending goes to K-14 schools, including community colleges.

Although this was a local bond for L.A., it’s all part of the same broke, bankrupt and incompetent system. If so much money weren’t wasted at the local level like this, the locals wouldn’t need as much state money.

Moreover, as we’ve seen with the city of Bell and other scandals, “poor planning, frivolous spending and shoddy workmanship” is standard operating procedure for government.

More from the L.A. Times article.

The promise to L.A. voters:

The money would ease classroom crowding. It would make college buildings safer. New technology would enhance learning. And financial oversight would be stringent.

The reality:

But costly blunders by college officials, contractors and the district’s elected Board of Trustees have denied the system’s 142,000 students the full potential of one of California’s largest public works programs.

This picture emerges from scores of interviews and a review of thousands of pages of district financial records, internal e-mails and other documents.

At East Los Angeles College, construction of a grand entry plaza with a clock tower degenerated into a comedy of errors. Heating and cooling units were installed upside down, inspectors found. Concrete steps were uneven. Cracked and wet lumber had to be torn out. A ramp for the disabled was too steep for wheelchairs, and the landmark clock tower listed to one side.

Fixing the problems helped drive construction costs from $28 million to $43 million.

The Three Stooges could build better than these clowns.

More:

A new health and science center at Valley College was marred by defective plumbing, cracked floors, leaky windows and loosely attached ceiling panels that threatened to crash down in an earthquake.

The district paid a contractor $48 million to build the complex, but had to hire others to correct the problems and finish the project — for an additional $3.5 million.

At least those buildings were finished, eventually. At West Los Angeles College, officials spent $39 million to design and begin construction of four major buildings, only to discover that they didn’t have the money to complete them.

Just as crews were starting work last summer, the projects, including a $92-million athletics center, were abandoned.

Read the rest for yourself and weep for the wast of taxpayer dollars. (Part two is here.)

And resolve to oppose Brown’s tax increase.

Feb. 28, 2011